No Arabic abstract
One of Aesops (La Fontains) famous fables `The Ant and the Grasshopper is widely known to give a moral lesson through comparison between the hard working ant and the party-loving grasshopper. Here we show a slightly different version of this fable, namely, The Ant and the Metrohopper, which describes human mobility patterns in modern urban life. Numerous real transportation networks and the trajectory data have been studied in order to understand mobility patterns. We study trajectories of commuters on the public transportation of Metropolitan Seoul, Korea. Smart cards (Integrated Circuit Cards; ICCs) are used in the public transportation system, which allow collection of transit transaction data, including departure and arrival stations and time. This empirical analysis provides human mobility patterns, which impact traffic forecasting and transportation optimization, as well as urban planning.
The Metropolitan Seoul Subway system, consisting of 380 stations, provides the major transportation mode in the metropolitan Seoul area. Focusing on the network structure, we analyze statistical properties and topological consequences of the subway system. We further study the passenger flows on the system, and find that the flow weight distribution exhibits a power-law behavior. In addition, the degree distribution of the spanning tree of the flows also follows a power law.
The master equation approach is proposed to describe the evolution of passengers in a subway system. With the transition rate constructed from simple geographical consideration, the evolution equation for the distribution of subway passengers is found to bear skew distributions including log-normal, Weibull, and power-law distributions. This approach is then applied to the Metropolitan Seoul Subway system: Analysis of the trip data of all passengers in a day reveals that the data in most cases fit well to the log-normal distributions. Implications of the results are also discussed.
Swarm intelligence is widely recognized as a powerful paradigm of self-organized optimization, with numerous examples of successful applications in distributed artificial intelligence. However, the role of physical interactions in the organization of traffic flows in ants under crowded conditions has only been studied very recently. The related results suggest new ways of congestion control and simple algorithms for optimal resource usage based on local interactions and, therefore, decentralized control concepts. Here, we present a mathematical analysis of such a concept for an experiment with two alternative ways with limited capacities between a food source and the nest of an ant colony. Moreover, we carry out microscopic computer simulations for generalized setups, in which ants have more alternatives or the alternative ways are of different lengths. In this way and by variation of interaction parameters, we can get a better idea, how powerful congestion control based on local repulsive interactions may be. Finally, we will discuss potential applications of this design principle to routing in traffic or data networks and machine usage in supply systems.
We aim at getting high spatial resolution information on the dusty core of bipolar planetary nebulae to directly constrain the shaping process. Methods: We present observations of the dusty core of the extreme bipolar planetary nebula Menzel 3 (Mz 3, Hen 2-154, the Ant) taken with the mid-infrared interferometer MIDI/VLTI and the adaptive optics NACO/VLT. The core of Mz 3 is clearly resolved with MIDI in the interferometric mode, whereas it is unresolved from the Ks to the N bands with single dish 8.2 m observations on a scale ranging from 60 to 250 mas. A striking dependence of the dust core size with the PA angle of the baselines is observed, that is highly suggestive of an edge-on disk whose major axis is perpendicular to the axis of the bipolar lobes. The MIDI spectrum and the visibilities of Mz 3 exhibit a clear signature of amorphous silicate, in contrast to the signatures of crystalline silicates detected in binary post-AGB systems, suggesting that the disk might be relatively young. We used radiative-transfer Monte Carlo simulations of a passive disk to constrain its geometrical and physical parameters. Its inclination (74 degrees $pm$ 3 degrees) and position angle (5 degrees $pm$ 5 degrees) are in accordance with the values derived from the study of the lobes. The inner radius is 9$pm$ 1 AU and the disk is relatively flat. The dust mass stored in the disk, estimated as 1 x 10-5Msun, represents only a small fraction of the dust mass found in the lobes and might be a kind of relic of an essentially polar ejection process.
Detached circumstellar dust shells are detected around three carbon variables using Herschel-PACS. Two of them are already known on the basis of their thermal CO emission and two are visible as extensions in IRAS imaging data. By model fits to the new data sets, physical sizes, expansion timescales, dust temperatures, and more are deduced. A comparison with existing molecular CO material shows a high degree of correlation for TT Cyg and U Ant but a few distinct differences with other observables are also found.